one year ago, two years ago.

i feel i ought to say something to keep up the tradition. loquax turned five years old on saturday (sort of, we seem to have slipped a week over the years and created ourselves an official birthday on the 8th). it still astounds me that we created a feasible business when all we were really doing was screwing around with the web and sharing out the luck we’d had winning online competitions. but when i’m laden down with accounting and sysadmin and payroll and users it’s hard to see it as anything but a business, which is good i think. it’s still fun but in a different way to how it was when we began, and in a better way too i think.

the major change in the last year has been that loquax has become a full time job for me after sucking up the majority of my spare time for years. i now have some actual genuine spare time. a providential redundancy even saved me the tedious business of working out my notice. the financial concerns of running a small business are minor compared to the financial concerns of an employee of an ailing business, it’s all about being in control.

on the statistics side of things: loquax served about 3.7 million pages in january 2003 which puts us about 50% up on last year. the rate of growth is slowing each year but we’re pretty happy with it because the lack of rapid change means we can sustain things and we’ve still never actively promoted the site.

in short, things are still good, i’m very lucky, and it feels wonderful to be in a situation where the adage the harder i work, the luckier i get actually applies.